Uddipana Goswami traces Guwahati’s journey towards consumerism and corruption and suggests culture and literature can save the city’s soul.
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| You could find salvation in Guwahati for your consumerist soul, or lose your self in the dark shadows accentuated by its dazzling lights |
I HAVE written many times about the many Guwahatis of the
mind – how the city is its own place and yet, takes on a different meaning for
the different people who live in it, write about it, and engage with it in
various ways. In my childhood years, I was oblivious to the pains of growing up
that my city, my sister, was going through.
Already a
woman,
Wounded,
shot, raped, violated,
Pretending
to be a child
Holding
hands
Leading me
away from herself
So I would
not feel
Your pain so
early.
Much later, in an effort to understand her better, I followed
the poet Nilim Kumar, as he
…flounders
around
In alleys
and footpaths, under sewers
In
storehouses in the dark, amidst the cacophony of motor cars
I tried to acquire the same empathy which does not allow him
to
…turn up his
nose even at the maggots wriggling
On carcasses
in alleys and sewers in the darkness
Beneath the
footpaths…
Beneath her ‘layers of filth, a thousand years old’, I
marvelled at Harekrishna Deka’s
…scintillating
Silent lover
Under a
green veil of pat
I also tried to come to terms with the neurosis of Sushil
Duara in Silabhadra’s ‘Smog’. In that short story, Duara cannot reconcile with
the contemporary violent history of an insurgency-ridden Guwahati. The mindless
violence that scars a familiar landscape drives him to insanity. I had also
seen and felt this insanity, this paranoia, creep into the minds of many of the
old inhabitants of the city. These are the middle class professionals like my
parents who migrated from villages and mofussil towns, for whom security of
life and property was of paramount importance. Anything that threatened to
destabilise their carefully organised lives – be it insurgents who made
political statements through bombs and bullets or the state’s armed forces
stationed on the pavements outside their houses, leering at their girls or slapping their boys just because they were
walking by – seemed terrifying. They had come to Guwahati when it was still
confined to the riverfront of Uzan Bazar or the bookshops of Panbazar or the
commercial areas of Fancy Bazar; when places like Bamunimaidam, Beltola and
Azara did not have concrete edifices but paddy fields and wetlands. Like the
middle class everywhere, they gave the city the best and the worst – the
narrow-minded spy-next-door as well as the greatest of emancipated literary
minds, the habitual apathy of indolence as well as the mass participation in
the Assam Movement of the 1980s.
A city is a living, breathing organism, and it will always
have its inherent contradictions. During the last 15 years of self-imposed
exile from the city, every time I have been back for any length of time, I
could always feel these contradictions growing enormously. The last time – and
the longest – I was here for more than a year at a stretch, I got to know the
new Guwahati more closely. I saw how Guwahati was fast getting over its initial
fears. There was just too much money (thanks to insurgency, counter-insurgency
and what have you) and too many opportunities for Guwahatians to have any
reason to complain against the State.
This time when I am back again to stay, I get to know that
‘New’ Guwahati is no longer the old address near Bamunimaidam where my bank has
a branch. It is the Guwahati-Shillong (GS) Road with its swanky new look,
multi-storied malls housing the largest brands, upmarket eateries and yuppy
hangouts. The Chandmari flyover is no longer the mecca for all young lovers, there are other hangouts that ensure
more privacy and intimacy. The people I meet ask each other ‘Where are you
from?’ instead of ‘Whose house do you belong to?’ as was wont in a city where
everybody seemed to know everybody else. Conversations veer around ‘Pizza Hut
tonight or Khorika?’ instead of ‘Should we cook mas tenga today or simple alu pitika?’ After work, one friend does
not remind the other it is his turn to bring home a ‘half’ today – because his
wife was cooking pork and xukan mas
for dinner and that was more than enough.
Guwahati today is no longer the city that could be your kin
or your lover. It is an evolving urban sprawl, chaotic and mismanaged like any
other. You could find salvation here for your consumerist soul, or lose your
self in the dark shadows accentuated by its dazzling lights. What would the
poet have to say today? I do not know, but I do feel that the key to Guwahati’s
future course of development lies somewhere between poetry and politics,
between culture and commerce.
As the gateway to the entire northeastern region, Guwahati
needs to be many of the things we hate about it. Its commercial character is
perhaps as much a result of natural evolution as of its centrality in the
Northeast. After all, if Pantaloons opens a showroom beyond Ganeshguri and
nearer to Shillong, we do find people coming down in droves from the
neighbouring hill city, disembarking at the mall, going on a shopping spree and
returning home the same day without entering the rest of the city. Guwahati has
to cater to the region at large in the absence of a similarly large enough,
similarly accessible urban centre elsewhere. For instance, the escalating sales
of cars – 32,000 vehicles were reported by Seven
Sisters Post as registered in Guwahati between 1 April and 30 September
2011 – are as much a result of demand within Guwahati city (witness its clogged
roads and constant traffic jams) as of demand from all over the Northeast. If
the smoke from these cars has clouded the city’s soul, the same smoke-screen of
counter-insurgency money also envelops the entire region. In an effort to
co-opt the revolutionary propensities of the disgruntled peoples of the region,
the Indian State ensures a steady flow of finances – whether through official
channels or unofficial – so that corruption and consumerism can overshadow
cultural and ethnic aspirations.
The truth that the entire Northeast shares the same fate –
thanks in large measure to insurgency, militarisation and misgovernance – is
nowhere more clearly manifested than in the writings by authors in and from the
region. Conflict is a common thread in most of these writings which are finally
a means of coping with the violent and chaotic history of our times. As the
city that reflects this commonality, as well as the setting that can give the
penned-down collective experiences a commercial outlet, Guwahati then should
also act as the literary and cultural hub for the region.
There is no escaping the truism that literary products are
finally commodities to be traded in. The challenge is to provide them with an
ideal locale where the trader (in this case, the publisher), the craftsperson
(the author) and the consumer (the reader) can come together in synergy. The
aim should be to give the publisher her profit, to ensure the author her due –
both in terms of commercial success and a discerning audience – and to provide
the reader with a platform where she can choose which product gives her the
best value for money. All of this Guwahati can and should provide.
Many literary events in fact are being organised or are
underway in Guwahati. The Anwesha Children’s Book Fair (6-8 November) brought
together school children and teachers, publishers of children’s literature and
readers of the same. While the North East Book Fair which started on 14
December will go on till 27 December, the North East Foundation is also
planning a Guwahati Literary Festival on 6-8 January. All of these events have
or will see participation by national and international literary organisations
and individuals. At a time when the demand for the literature of the Northeast
is on the rise, the city should try and cash in on such fairs and festivals to
turn its image around. From being the corruption and commercial capital of the
region, perhaps it is time now to establish Guwahati as the cultural and
literary heart of the Northeast.
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